The weight of examples rather than carefully constructed arguments serves to buoy assertions. As in much of Gimbutas’s earlier work, the book raises intriguing questions but provides answers that are often unsatisfying and oversimplified, creating dichotomies that are more imagined than real. Unfortunately, The Living Goddesses is a single-minded, essentializing, and largely unrigorous sweep through the mythology and folklore of prehistoric, historic, and modern Europe and the Mediterranean.

The central problem rests, however, not with the editing. While Dexter has done an admirable job editing and shaping the manuscript, the book, inevitably, suffers from some unevenness. As Dexter informs us in the book’s preface, Gimbutas had reworked the first chapters more carefully than the final ones, and although she had planned extensive illustrations for the second half, none had been chosen at the time of Gimbutas’s death. Miriam Robbins Dexter, Lecturer in the Programs of Women’s Studies at UCLA and Liberal Arts at Antioch University undertook the formidable task of editing and supplementing the manuscript.

The Living Goddesses, Gimbutas’s last book, was close to completion at the time of her death in 1994. Although Gimbutas’s beliefs in an early matrilineal/focal society throughout what she terms “Old Europe” (Pre-Indo-European culture) have been embraced by many grassroots feminists as the authoritative scholarly voice on the topic, her reception among academic archaeologists has been less than favorable, running the gamut from apathy and annoyance to disdain and bitter controversy. Anyone familiar with these books knows that they have never rested comfortably on the shelves of academia.

The archaeologist most closely linked with the “Goddess Movement” is indisputably Marija Gimbutas, whose prodigious publication record includes three major books on the Goddesses of Neolithic Europe and the Mediterranean: The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe (1974), tellingly renamed and reissued as The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1982) The Language of the Goddess (1989) and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991). 1 A few minutes surfing the Net produces hundreds of “Goddess” entries ranging from scholarly articles, lectures, course syllabi, and videos, to Goddess aromatherapy, “spiritual stencils” for furniture, walls, and fabrics, and pilgrimages to Goddess sites.

As millennium fever heats up, the Goddess is surfacing, perhaps predictably, with renewed vigor in every conceivable venue. Even the Internet is now protected by a deity - the Net Goddess’ Page - guarding against quakes, viruses, and stalled links, and granting continuous connections and fast-loading pages.

Marija gimbutas the living goddesses